NewerTech Media Coverage I recently purchased a NewerTech Voyager S3 SATA disk dock from OWC for use with my Mac Mini. So what is the Voyager S3? It is a stand into which 3.5" or 2.5" SATA disk drives up to 6 TB in size can be 'plugged in'. The Voyager S3 has it's own external power source and attaches to your computer via a USB (USB 3.0, backwards compatible with 2.0) connection. The stand has a power and activity light on the front, and a power button on the rear. An eject button on the top of the unit assists in removing drives. With the industry standard USB connection the unit is compatible with OS X, Linux and Windows systems.

Operation is simple. When I received the unit I connected it by USB cable to my Mac Mini, then attached the included power adapter. I dropped in an 80GB SATA drive and turned the unit on. My Mac saw the drive and let me know that it was not formatted. I formatted the drive using Disk Utility and the drive was automatically mounted upon completion of formatting.

I currently have three SATA drives that I have formatted and can attach any of them in minutes for data archiving and retrieval. This is a low cost method of augmenting your system storage while keeping your costs low. I have wanted one of these for a few years and now that I have it, I see that it will become an integral part of my system operation.